Hyphae is a bi-annual peer-reviewed journal emerging from the intellectual ecosystem of Mind & Life Europe, an organisation shaped by the living legacy of Francisco Varela and by the enactive understanding of the deep continuity of life and mind. The journal seeks to bring diverse perspectives on mind and life into conversation, with particular openness to interdisciplinary inquiries that illuminate and deepen our understanding of the vital interconnections among, for instance, knowledge, emotion, embodiment, experience, selfhood, intersubjectivity, community, human and non-human animal sentience and mind, nature, technology and AI, meaning, care, values, health, creativity, wisdom, and contemplation. Hyphae explores real-life questions and embodied experiences in hopes of promoting more meaningful ways of being, living, and acting in the world.

We understand dialogue as representing diverse traditions of thought within a generative space for participatory sense-making. Dialogue is a living middle ground: a space in-between that supports the activities of collective sense-making. Because hyperspecialised or polarised contexts tend to shrink this space of encounter, our aspiration is to cultivate participatory interdisciplinary practices that will unlock new knowledge, nurturing new research and methodological practices in line with the mission of Mind & Life Europe.

We align to Open Science and we are committed to foster diverse and inclusive academic cultures in consonance with an ethics of knowing and epistemic responsibility.

Dedicated to supporting diverse and wide-ranging academic research, Hyphae is the Mind & Life Europe’s open-access journal free of charge to authors and readers alike, supported by the Royal Danish Library in cooperation with Aarhus University. It is sponsored by the Italian Buddhist Union Research Center.

Prof Laura Candiotto

University of Cagliari (IT) & University of Pardubice (CZ)

Philosophy, Ethics, and Epistemology

Laura Candiotto is Associate Professor in Moral Philosophy at the University of Cagliari (IT) and at the Center for Ethics of the University of Pardubice (CZ). Her main research field is philosophy of emotions, at the intersection of enactive ethics and social epistemology. She is leading two research projects: (1) “Vicious Epistemic Cultures”, on the ethics of knowledge with a specific focus on emotional friction in revision responsibility; (2) “Loving is Caring”, on Plato’s care of the soul and its contribution to the contemporary ethics of care.

Over the last ten years, she has worked on love, compassion, wonder, grief, and shame, bridging her expertise in the Socratic method of inquiry and the enactive approach to participatory sense-making. She contributed to the epistemology of emotions research by carving out a situated model of epistemic emotions as embedded in dialogical interactions and communities of inquiry. She is now focusing on environmental emotions, especially the intertwining of love, grief and hope in inhabiting a place that is dying and in climate migration. She is very much interested in the potential transformative power of the affective experience under the weight of oppression. As a Tibetan Buddhism practitioner and member of Mind and Life Europe, she has a longstanding interest in the role of emotions in contemplative practices with a focus on embodiment and desire. She edited “The value of emotions for knowledge” (Palgrave 2019), “Emotions in Plato” (Brill 2020), “The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions” (Routledge 2025). By December 2026 “Vice Epistemology and the Philosophy of Emotions” will be out with Routledge. She wrote four monographs in Italian and she is now completing her first monograph in English, titled “Emotional Friction” (forthcoming in 2027).

Amy Cohen Varela

Mind and Life Europe

Psychology and Psychoanalysis

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and involved with Mind & Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialised in psychodynamic therapy and philosophy. Amy studied comparative literature at Brown and Columbia Universities before moving to Paris in the early ’80s, where she received her degree in clinical psychology at the University of Paris 7, with a specialty in psychodynamic theory and practice, and in parallel, completed psychoanalytic training.

Prof Andreas Roepstorff

University of Aarhus (DK)

Cognitive Science & Interaction Studies

Andreas Roesptorff is a Professor in Cognition, Communication and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark, and is the director of the Interacting Minds Centre. Trained in biology and social anthropology, his research explores human collaboration and interaction, using a multitude of approaches and methods. He also studies the workings of the brain, particularly at the levels of consciousness, cognition, and communication. He has been associated with the Mind & Life community for over a decade, and is on the board of Mind & Life Europe; he has published numerous studies on mindfulness from an interdisciplinary social cognition perspective. Roepstorff is often in the media and is involved in research administration and policy-making. He is invited to the Advisory Committee as an expert in interdisciplinary mindfulness research and as the leader of a successful university-based Centre.

Prof Martijn Van Beek

University of Aarhus (DK)

Contemplative Studies and Anthropology

Martijn van Beek is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and affiliated with the Interacting Minds Centre, both at Aarhus University, Denmark. Having worked and conducted research for many years on politics and development in Ladakh and elsewhere in the Himalayan region, for the past two decades his research has increasingly focused on the meeting ground between contemplative traditions, especially Buddhism, consciousness research, and modernity. His research seeks to contribute to refining our understanding and the significance of emergent forms of contemplative ways of living for people and for the planet. He is also engaged in research on the (micro-)phenomenology of contemplative practice and experience. Martijn teaches sustainable ways of living and contemplative life in context, in theory and in practice at Aarhus University and elsewhere. He lives at Vaekstcenter, a contemplative community in Denmark.

Prof Christian Suhr

University of Aarhus (DK)

Anthropology and Media Studies

Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and professor of anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author and director of the award-winning film and book “Descending with angels” about possession, psychiatry, and Islamic exorcism (MUP 2019, www.descendingwithangels.com). In 2022, he completed the film “Light upon light” in collaboration with the Cairo-based film collective Hassala Films (to be screened at ESRI). Christian Suhr is currently working as the PI of an ERC-STG project entitled “Heart Openings”. The project uses microphenomenology, life story interviews, and audiovisual tools of experiential elicitation to explore the experience and cultivation of love in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.

Prof Julien Tempone-Wiltshire

Australian College of Applied Psychology (AU)

Counseling and Psychotherapy

Julien Tempone-Wiltshire is an Associate Professor of Counselling and Psychotherapy in Melbourne, Australia. His focus concerns the progressive dialogue between relational psychoanalysis, contemplative practice and transpersonal psychology. Coordinating the largest psychotherapy training institute in Australia, he seeks to generate for students a transformative pedagogical experience utilising participatory sensemaking to foster the generation of a collective transformative process. To this end he seeks to train clinicians in forms of Deep Listening, in collaborative dialogue with Aboriginal Australian scholars in Indigenous wisdom practices. Academically, his recent efforts are directed towards fostering a recognition of the incipient relational turn in mindfulness-based interventions; the turn from the intrapsychic to the collective. Indeed both research and clinical training models are underpinned by a relational model of self-emergence and a processual view of healing. He believes in the necessity of fostering community-based therapeutic approaches that can respond to the need for collective healing through transformative meeting across difference.

Prof Josipa Mihic

University of Zagreb (HR)

Education and Social Sciences

Josipa Mihić is an associate professor at the Department of Behavioral Disorders at the Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb. She is a co-founder of the Laboratory for Prevention Research (PrevLab – https://www.erf.unizg.hr/hr/about-us/organization/institute/prevlab) within which she researches risk behaviors, emotional and social competencies in children and youth, the effect of contemplative education and mindfulness practice on mental health and positive development, and the role of self-compassion and compassion in preventing behavioral problems and promoting mental health. She is a trained Gestalt psychotherapist and a co-founder of a MiniMindfulness learning platform.

Prof Marieke van Vugt

University of Groningen (NL)

Neuroscience

Marieke van Vugt is an associate professor at the Bernoulli Institute of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Groningen (Netherlands). The research in Prof van Vugt’s lab focuses on how, when and why we mind-wander, and what the fundamental cognitive operations are that underlie meditation and mindfulness. Most recently, she started to investigate how analytical meditation practised by Tibetan monks and nuns affects cognition and emotion. She addresses these questions using a combination of computational modelling, neuroscience, and experimental psychology tools. She very much enjoys projects where science, art (particularly classical ballet), and contemplation meet.

Dr Joshua Bergamin

University of Vienna (AT)

Philosophy of Mind and Aesthetics

Joshua Bergamin is a philosopher, among other things. He works at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science, with a particular focus on improvisation, and has collaborated with musicians, psychologists, and artistic researchers in music and film. He is especially interested in collective sense-making, the limits of rationality in human thought and action, and in the overlap of ethics and aesthetics. From September 2026 he will be a Research Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies; previously, he was co-PI of (Musical) Improvisation & Ethics at the University of Vienna. 

Dr Chiara Mascarello

University of Venice (IT)

Religious Studies and Contemplative Studies

Chiara Mascarello holds a PhD in Philosophy, with a research background in Buddhist Philosophy and Tibetan Language developed at Sera Jey Monastic University (India), the UMA Institute for Tibetan Studies (USA), and the University of Hamburg (Germany).

Currently an Assistant Professor of Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice following her postdoctoral fellowship, she has been teaching Tibetan Language there since 2020. Her research focuses on Indo-Tibetan Buddhist contemplative literature, its contemporary transmission, and its interdisciplinary dialogue with modern consciousness studies. She is the author of Self-Awareness in Tibetan Buddhism: The Philosophical Relevance of Rang rig and Its Contribution to the Contemporary Debates on the Nature of Consciousness (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2025).

Her institutional contributions include co-founding and serving on the Board of the University of Padua’s Postgraduate Program in Contemplative Studies, lecturing for the University of Udine’s Postgraduate Program in Meditation and Neuroscience, and sitting on the Steering Committee of the international Contemplative Education Network. After co-directing the Italian Buddhist Union’s (UBI) Research Center for five years, she now serves as a Scientific Consultant, supporting its mission to advance education and research in Buddhist, Contemplative, and Consciousness Studies. She has also served as a Tibetan translator and interpreter for numerous Tibetan masters and led specialized translation workshops since 2013.

Dr Francesco Tormen

University of Padua (IT)

Religious Studies and Contemplative Studies

Francesco Tormen is the Scientific Director of the Research Center of the Italian Buddhist Union and the scientific coordinator of the Master’s program in Contemplative Studies at the University of Padua. Formerly an Adjunct Professor of Tibetan Language and Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, he works on integrating Buddhist philosophical and phenomenological insights into contemporary cultural and epistemic contexts. His research interests and publications include Tibetan Madhyamaka philosophy, Tibetan dream yoga and interdisciplinary studies on lucid dreaming, the development of secular wisdom-based meditative trainings, and the relationship between Buddhism and AI, with a focus on posthumanism, transhumanism, and the future of contemplative education.

Prof Bruno Clarke

Texas Tech University (USA)

Systems Theory and Ecology

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. In 2019 he was the Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His latest books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (Cambridge 2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020). He co-edits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham University Press, and is the editor or co-editor of seven essay collections, most recently Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). In Fall 2024 he led the Cybernetic Countercultures Intensive hosted by the San Francisco cultural incubator Gray Area. Since 2019 he has co-curated the website Gaian Systems: Planetary Cognition Lab.

John Kyle Apostolides

University of Pardubice (CZ)

Editorial assistant

John began studying mind and life at Juniata College, where he majored in Philosophy and Neuroscience Studies. Seeking to improve quality of life through research, John continued in clinical neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin and started working in consciousness diagnosis in medicine using music and EEG. A surprise opportunity came to work in epigenomics of aging in mammals, so John also delved into computational biology, figuring out what drives aging toward new therapies to reverse it. He now studies Ethics at University of Pardubice. John grew up in the Greek Orthodox tradition where contemplative studies and practice have been ongoing for at least two millennia. This background is combined with a passion for philosophy. So, when he heard about Francisco Varela’s integrating phenomenology and neuroscience; his insight that openness of heart cultivates learning and discovery; and his groundbreaking work starting Mind and Life, it was easy to recognize true inspiration.

Myria Xenofontos

Logo designer & artist

Myria is an interdisciplinary artist and designer with a background in architecture and a strong interest in neuroscience. Her work explores the subtle structures that shape how we connect, feel, and exist, sitting at the intersection of movement, perception, and visual form. Drawing from organic systems and lived experience, she approaches design as a process of discovery.

Her practice is guided by curiosity, allowing ideas to unfold through intuition and intention. She is particularly interested in what lies beneath the surface; the invisible patterns that shape behaviour, perception, and the cosmos. For Myria, art extends beyond aesthetics, it is a way of translating depth into form, making the unseen felt, and giving expression to what is often difficult to articulate.